1932.366: Portrait of Aurangzeb (after a Mughal painting)

The sale in 1747 of the collection amassed by the British portraitist and connoisseur Jonathan Richardson, Sr., included “A book of Indian Drawings by Rembrandt, 25 in number.”¹ Today we know of twenty-one drawings bearing Richardson’s collector’s mark that Rembrandt had freely copied from Indian paintings or drawings in the style practiced by artists working for the Mughal court in the first half of the seventeenth century.² Two additional Rembrandt drawings of this type—the Harvard work and one in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam—do not have the Richardson mark.³ Either they never belonged to him or they were once the left halves of sheets that originally depicted two figures and were subsequently cut apart, leaving only the right halves with Richardson’s stamp.⁴ The earliest recorded owner of the Harvard drawing was the English banker and collector William Esdaile (1758–1837), who had at least four, and possibly five, of the artist’s copies after Indian works.⁵ The Dutch inscription een . . . Mogols, written in black chalk on the recto of the Harvard sheet, presumably predates Esdaile’s ownership of the drawing. If so, it might have been in the Netherlands in the eighteenth century and not in Richardson’s collection.

Indian works of art arrived in the Netherlands on the merchant vessels of the Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie (United East India Company). Inventories and auction advertisements of the latter half of the seventeenth century cite Indian paintings or drawings as “Oost-Indiaase tekeningen,” “Mogolse tekeningen,” or “Suratse tekeningen,” the last called after the port city where the company maintained one of its several factories on the subcontinent. The original works copied by Rembrandt have been dated from circa 1610 to circa 1655, but most were from the 1620s.⁶ In his 1656 etching Abraham Entertaining the Angels, Rembrandt incorporated elements from one of the Indian paintings he copied, so he must have known the original by that year.⁷ However, the copies may have originated somewhat later, around 1656–61, since their pen work and painterly washes recall the technique of drawings datable to the early 1660s.⁸ The original painting that inspired Abraham Entertaining the Angels is one of a large group, now in the Austrian National Library, that belonged to a Dutch collection before they arrived in Vienna in the eighteenth century.⁹ Otto Benesch proposed that one of the paintings in this group served as the model for the Harvard drawing (Fig. 1), but this has since been questioned.¹⁰ The 1656 inventory of Rembrandt’s movable property included “curious miniature drawings,” and although not specified as “Mogolse,” “Suratse,” or “Oost-Indiaase” works, they might have been Indian paintings or drawings, including those he copied. If so, it is noteworthy that the master stored them with prints of “various sorts of costumes,” which, in any event, must have been primary motivations for his interest in these works.¹¹

The support of the Harvard drawing, like those of all of Rembrandt’s copies after Indian works, is an Asian paper.¹² He worked primarily in dark brown ink, adding light brown wash to evoke an aureole with radiating lines immediately around the head and to describe the delicate shading on the jacket and sleeve. Corrections, deletions, and additions, some by Rembrandt, others by later hands, have been introduced. The vertical shadow between the right upper arm and chest evidently looked too dark to the artist, and he lightened it by brushing white opaque watercolor over the pen lines. White opaque watercolor also covers the U -shaped contour of the necklace, the narrow diagonal band on the turban, and one or two of the vertical pleats of the sash.¹³ Rembrandt initially sketched the end of the sword behind the figure too low, and he drew it a second time, aligning it with the hilt, which is just below the fingers of the man’s extended right arm. The pen stroke that describes the strap of the shield originally ran over the right wrist, and Rembrandt or, possibly, a later hand scratched out part of the stroke, so it now appears to hang behind the arm. The large areas of gray wash that nearly fill the sheet above and around the figure are a later addition, as are small touches of the same gray wash on the cheek and forehead. The scratchwork erasure of the first draft of the end of the sword postdates the addition of the gray wash: examination under magnification reveals where the abrasion removed patches of the wash, exposing the underlying cream-colored support.

That the Harvard drawing belongs to the group of Rembrandt’s copies after Indian paintings and drawings has been doubted by some scholars, whose misgivings were influenced by the later additions to the work and the inaccurate description of the support as a European paper, as well as by the absence of Richardson’s mark.¹⁴ However, the original pen work resembles that of his other copies after Indian works, such as the sheet in the Morgan Library and Museum, where the handling of the shield and beard are comparable (Fig. 2), while the technique of the floral pattern on the jacket resembles the description of decorative details in other drawings in the group.¹⁵

Finally, Martin Royalton-Kisch has questioned the attribution to Rembrandt of the whole group of copies after Indian works, wondering if they could be by Arent de Gelder or another pupil.¹⁶ While the handling of these drawings, in Royalton-Kisch’s view, “seems so unlike Rembrandt’s habitual draftsmanship,” some of their pen work, as Peter Schatborn noted in correspondence, is comparable to that in Profile Portrait of Andrea Doria (c. 1656–58), The Presentation in the Temple (1661), and the preliminary sketch for the painting Isaac and Rebecca (“The Jewish Bride”).¹⁷ The fine pen lines in the copies of Indian works occur in other of Rembrandt’s drawings from the 1650s, such as his copy of Andrea Mantegna’s The Calumny of Apelles.¹⁸ The exceptional purpose of this group of Rembrandt’s drawings, specifically his interest in details of the costumes, accounts in part for the differences between their technique and the broader, more summary handling of other late studies by the artist.

Notes

¹ Sale, Cock, London, 22 January 1747 and seventeen following nights, eighteenth night’s sale, lot 70. The lot was evidently withdrawn from the sale by Jonathan Richardson, Jr., who eventually sold some of the drawings to his brother-in-law Thomas Hudson, a former pupil of Richardson, Sr.; Carol Gibson-Wood, “‘A Judiciously Disposed Collection’: Jonathan Richardson Senior’s Cabinet of Drawings,” in Christopher Baker, Caroline Elam, and Genevieve Warwick, eds., Collecting Prints and Drawings in Europe, c. 1500–1750 (Aldershot, England and Burlington, Vermont, 2003), pp. 155–72, pp. 158–59. My thanks to Mary McWilliams for her helpful comments on a draft of this entry.

² Peter Schatborn, Rembrandt and His Circle: Drawings in the Frits Lugt Collection (Bussum, Netherlands, 2010), vol. 1, under cat. 20, pp. 80–81. Nineteen are in Otto Benesch, The Drawings of Rembrandt, enlarged and edited by Eva Benesch (Oxford, 1973), vol. 5, cats. 1187–97 (including no. 1194A, which was not in Benesch’s 1954–57 edition), 1199–1201, and 1203–6. Another was seen by Frits Lugt about 1966 and by Martin Royalton-Kisch in 2002 in a French private collection, but remains unpublished; Felice Stampfle in Rubens and Rembrandt in Their Century: Flemish and Dutch Drawings of the 17th Century from The Pierpont Morgan Library (Paris: Institut Néerlandais; Antwerp: Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten; London: British Museum; New York: Pierpoint Morgan Library, 1979), under cat. 75, p. 107, and Schatborn (2010), vol. 1, under cat. 20, p. 82; Martin Royalton-Kisch, Catalogue of Drawings by Rembrandt and His School in the British Museum (London, 2010), under cat. 56 (n. 11). Carlos van Hasselt suggested that it was once mounted with the only other copy by Rembrandt after an Indian painting or drawing that depicts a woman (Jeroen Giltaij, Drawings by Rembrandt and His School in the Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, vol. 2, Rotterdam, 1988, cat. 31, pp. 96–97). According to Royalton-Kisch, the drawing measures 70 × 94 mm, bears the mark of Richardson, Sr., and was later in the Cosway, Utterson, Madame F., and Lepage collections. Another drawing with Richardson’s mark that is not in Benesch is now in the Achenbach Foundation for the Graphic Arts, San Francisco; William Robinson, “[Review] Schatborn: Drawings by Rembrandt, His Anonymous Pupils and Followers,” Kunstchronik, vol. 41, no. 10 (October 1988): 579–86, p. 585, repr. fig. 4a; Martin Royalton-Kisch, Drawings by Rembrandt and His Circle in the British Museum (London, 1992), under cat. 65, p. 147, repr. fig. 65a; James A. Ganz, Rembrandt’s Century (San Francisco: Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, 2013), pp. 44–45 and 158, repr. p. 45, fig. 41.

³ For the Amsterdam drawing, see Peter Schatborn, Drawings by Rembrandt, His Anonymous Pupils and Followers. Catalogue of the Dutch and Flemish Drawings in the Rijksprentenkabinet, Rijksmuseum, Vol. 4 (The Hague, 1985), cat. 60, pp. 126–31. It has been suggested that two drawings on Asian paper, without Richardson’s mark, that belonged in 1906 to the archducal collection in Weimar (Cornelis Hofstede de Groot, Die Handzeichnungen Rembrandts, Haarlem, 1906, cats. 541 and 542, pp. 123–24) were also copies after Indian works. According to Hofstede de Groot, these untraceable drawings were inscribed in Rembrandt’s hand “na een oostindies poppetje geschets” (sketched from an East Indian doll) (no. 541) and “na Oostind. poppetje” (after an East Indian doll) (no. 542). However, Hofstede de Groot described them both as “Studie nach einer orientalischen Holzfigur” (study after an oriental wooden figure), and the description of the two drawings in the 1895 sale of W. Pitcairn Knowles also unequivocally states that they were after a three-dimensional model that Rembrandt drew from different angles: “Deux études d’après une figurine provenant de la Chine ou Japon. [Rembrandt] s’est donné la peine d’esquisser cette statuette de différents points de vues. . . ” (sale, Muller, Amsterdam, 25–26 June 1895, lot 521).

⁴ Schatborn (1985), p. 129 (n. 12). Both drawings are first recorded in nineteenth-century British collections: Esdaile (Harvard) and Warwick (Amsterdam). Neither shows traces of the gilt borders of Richardson’s mounts. Richardson also owned Indian drawings, of which four bearing his mark have come to light. It is possible, although unlikely, that he kept them in his “book of Indian Drawings by Rembrandt.”

⁵ In addition to the three drawings from Esdaile’s collection listed by Benesch (vol. 5, cat. 1187, pp. 318–19, cat. 1198, p. 323, and cat. 1201, pp. 323–24), the collector owned the Louvre drawing (idem, cat. 1188, pp. 312–20). The latter does not show Esdaile’s mark, but it was in his sale, Christie’s, London, 23 June 1840 (fifth day’s sale), lot 1049 (“An Oriental Prince, Seated in Council, with eight attendants, pen and Indian ink, from Houlditch’s collection”). Esdaile owned another drawing that was almost certainly one of Rembrandt’s copies after Indian works, but which may not be recorded in the literature: his sale, Christie’s, London, 17 June 1840, lot 25 (“A PERSIAN FIGURE; with a subject on the reverse”). Most of Rembrandt’s copies are mounted down, so it is possible that one of the single figures catalogued by Benesch (such as Benesch, vol. 5, cats. 1191, 1193, 1194, and 1200) has both another subject and Esdaile’s mark on its inaccessible verso. This work would have belonged to the group of 100 Rembrandt drawings purchased by Esdaile in July 1835 from the estate of Sir Thomas Lawrence. It may be identical with a work listed in the manuscript inventory of Lawrence’s collection, Drawer 1, Case N. 1: “Study of a Turkish Figure Whole Length” in A Catalogue of Drawings by the Old Masters in the Possession of Sir Thomas Lawrence, P. R. A. at the time of his death (7th January 1830) Presented by Archibald Keightley (his Executor) to the Art Library of the South Kensington Museum 1869 This catalogue was made by Messrs. S. W. Woodburn in the presence of Mr. Keightley in 1834 (Ms., bound, London, Victoria and Albert Museum, National Art Library, ref. no. MSL/1870-1-18).

⁶ Pauline Lunsingh Scheurleer, “Mogol-Miniaturen door Rembrandt Nagetekend,” De Kroniek van het Rembrandthuis, vol. 32, no. 1 (1980): 10–40, pp. 14–16; Lunsingh Scheurleer, “De Moghul-Miniaturen van Rembrandt,” in Hanneke van den Muyzenberg and Thomas de Bruijn, eds., Waarom Sanskrit? Honderdvijfentwintig Jaar Sanskrit in Nederland (Leiden, 1991): 95–115, pp. 95–96 and 112–13 (n. 3).

⁷ Royalton-Kisch (1992), under cat. 62, pp. 141–42.

⁸ This was noted by Royalton-Kisch (1992, under cat. 62, p. 142), who compared them to such drawings as The Presentation in the Temple of 1661 and the preliminary sketch for the painting Isaac and Rebecca (“The Jewish Bride”), both of which are reproduced and discussed in Holm Bevers, Lee Hendrix, William W. Robinson, and Peter Schatborn, Drawings by Rembrandt and His Pupils: Telling the Difference (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2009), cat. 39.1, pp. 228 and 230–31, and cat. 40.1, pp. 232 and 234–35. See also Schatborn (2010), vol. 1, under cat. 20, p. 82.

⁹ Around 1760 many of them were cut up and reassembled in rocaille -shaped collages that were incorporated into the paneling of a room in Schloss Schönbrunn outside Vienna, where they remained until the 1980s. Most are provincial work from the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries; Lunsingh Scheurleer (1991), pp. 99–103; Ebba Koch, “‘The Moghuleries’ of the Millionenzimmer, Schönbrunn Palace, Vienna.” Rosemary Crill et al., eds., Arts of Mughal India: Studies in Honour of Robert Skelton (Ahmedabad, India and London, 2004), pp. 153–55. I am grateful to Stephanie Schrader for the latter reference and for other bibliographic advice for this entry.

¹⁰ Anonymous, Indian, Portrait of an Indian Nobleman (Fig. 1), seventeenth century. Transparent watercolor, Vienna, Schloss Schönbrunn, SKB 002612; see Otto Benesch, The Drawings of Rembrandt (Oxford, 1954–57), vol. 5, under cat. 1198, p. 340, repr. p. 339. However, Lunsingh Scheurleer (1980, p. 17) doubted that the Vienna painting was the original copied in the Harvard drawing, citing the different proportions of the figures and discrepancies between the turbans, jackets, and sashes.

¹¹ Schatborn (2010), vol. 1, under cat. 20, pp. 80 and 82 (n. 4). “Een ditto [kunst boeck] vol curieuse minijateur teeckeninge nevens verscheijde hout en kopere printen van alderhande dragt” (“An album filled with curious miniature drawings together with woodcuts and copper engravings of various sorts of costumes”); Strauss and Van der Meulen 1979, p. 369, document 1656/12.

¹² As stated by Schatborn (1985, pp. 128 and 129, n. 17), the Amsterdam drawing is on Asian paper, despite occasional claims that the paper is European. The Harvard sheet, too, was formerly thought to be on European paper, but tests carried out in 2008 by Debora Dyer Mayer indicate that the support is more likely Asian, probably made of gampi fibers. Mayer’s report is in the object file at the Harvard Art Museums. The appearance of a Western support is the result of an aggressive mounting of the drawing to a backing of European paper, the rough texture of which shows through the thin Asian paper. Two drawings on European papers have been related to the group of Rembrandt’s copies after Indian works. A study by Rembrandt on a sheet toned with brown wash shows a woman in a non-European costume identified by some as Indian; Benesch (1973), vol. 2, cat. 450, p. 107. Not only does this drawing date from the second half of the 1630s, about two decades earlier than the other works in the group, but specialists have pointed out that the costume is not authentically Indian; Lunsingh Scheurleer (1980), pp. 17–18, and Schatborn (2010), pp. 82–83 (n. 6). Giltaij (cat. 176, pp. 306–7) suggested that a drawing of a soldier by a Rembrandt pupil or follower—which bears Richardson’s mark, but is on European paper—was probably in Richardson’s album of Rembrandt’s Indian drawings. Apart from the question of the authorship of the drawing, this seems doubtful, since the costume and mustache of the figure identify him unequivocally as Polish. On the use of Asian paper for drawings and prints by Rembrandt and artists in his circle, see Jacobus van Breda, “Rembrandt Etchings on Oriental Papers: Papers in the Collection of the National Gallery of Victoria,” Art Bulletin of Victoria, vol. 38 (1997): 25–38, and Martin Royalton-Kisch and Akira Kofuku in Akira Kofuku et al., Rembrandt: The Quest for Chiaroscuro (Tokyo: National Museum of Western Art; Nagoya: City Art Museum, 2011), pp. 119–37.

¹³ Rembrandt’s corrections in white opaque watercolor on the turban and necklace have discolored, and a later owner attempted to remove them by scraping, leaving the remaining medium with a granular, gray appearance.

¹⁴ Agnes Mongan and Paul J. Sachs, Drawings in the Fogg Museum of Art: A Critical Catalogue (Cambridge, 1940), under cat. 527, p. 278; Felice Stampfle in Jane Turner and Felice Stampfle, Dutch Drawings in the Pierpont Morgan Library, Seventeenth to Nineteenth Centuries (New York, 2006), vol. 1, under cat. 221, p. 149. Benjamin P. J. Broos (“Rembrandts Indische miniaturen,” Spiegel Historiael, vol. 15, no. 4, April 1980: 210–18, p. 218) did not specifically cite the Harvard drawing, but he clearly referred to it as one of two drawings not on Asian paper and without the marks of Richardson or Richard Houlditch—the other being the work in the Rijksmuseum (Schatborn, 1985, cat. 60, pp. 126–31), which he believed to be by a nineteenth-century imitator of Rembrandt.

¹⁵ Rembrandt, after an Indian painting or drawing, Indian Warrior with a Shield (Fig. 2). Brown ink, brown wash, and some red wash on Japan paper, 178 × 100 mm. New York, Morgan Library and Museum, I, 207. Compare the handling of the sash in the drawing in San Francisco (see n. 2 above) with the jacket in the Harvard work and the turban with that of the drawing in the Fondation Custodia, Frits Lugt Collection, Paris (Benesch, 1973, vol. 5, cat. 1194, repr. fig. 1493).

¹⁶ Royalton-Kisch (2010), under cat. 56; Martin Royalton-Kisch in Kofuku et al., p. 120.

¹⁷ Martin Royalton-Kisch in Kofuku et al., p. 120; email correspondence between Peter Schatborn and the author, 23 March 2014. For Profile Portrait of Andrea Doria (Benesch, 1973, vol. 5, cat. 1186), see Holm Bevers, Rembrandt: Die Zeichnungen im Berliner Kupferstichkabinett; Kritischer Katalog (Berlin: Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, 2006), cat. 51, pp. 174–76. For The Presentation in the Temple and Isaac and Rebecca, see note 8 above.

¹⁸ Benesch (1973), vol. 5, cat. 1207; Royalton-Kisch (2010), cat. 46.